Spotlight Back on Kerry, but Reshaped Role Eludes Him

The deficit panel’s failure denied Senator John Kerry the mantle of domestic policy statesman, and he rejected talk that his motive was to become secretary of state.

ELISABETH BUMILLER

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON — A feverish scrum of reporters was in such pursuit of Senator John Kerry last Friday that he was chased all the way from a Senate meeting room to the subway under the Capitol, where in the chaos a blizzard of secret papers from debt reduction talks went flying from his arms. It was an inelegant moment, particularly for a onetime Democratic nominee for president, but Mr. Kerry stooped down and gathered up his own documents before he made an escape.

“It’s a tough negotiation,” he said gloomily as a subway car carried him away from talks that were in as much disarray as his papers.

This week the nation learned just how tough as the bipartisan panel tasked with deficit reduction announced its failure, triggering $1.2 trillion in automatic budget cuts over the next decade and enough recriminations to last through next year’s presidential election. For Mr. Kerry, an American foreign policy elder and an unlikely member of a panel that delved into the minutiae of federal finances, the breakdown deprives him of a role he sought, a domestic policy statesman as comfortable with tax codes as statecraft.

A victory would have burnished, or so the Washington wisdom went, his résumé for secretary of state, should there be an Obama second term.

“Who in God’s name thought that?” Mr. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, asked in an interview in his Senate office this week, shortly before the failure of the panel became public. “That’s ridiculous. You know, engaging in this kind of thing is not a job interview for anything.”

He joined the so-called super-committee, he said, because he wanted a role in the central issues facing the country, reviving the economy and creating jobs.

“I thought it was important to be in the fight rather than on the sidelines,” said Mr. Kerry, who for years toiled in the domestic policy shadow of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, his senior state colleague. He blamed Republicans for the panel’s failure, saying they refused to yield on a no-new-taxes pledge, just as Republicans blamed the Democrats for inflexibility on money-saving changes to programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Republicans also singled out Mr. Kerry for what one called a “rogue” effort on Monday to make a deal on taxes (Mr. Kerry said it was his best last-ditch try), and for talking a lot, an infamous Kerry characteristic, during panel meetings — something noted on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” last week. “Of course he’s talking too much!” Mr. Stewart bellowed. “That’s his super power!”

The senator, who missed the show, made light of it later. “Well, if you’re pushing to get something done,” he said in the interview, “you have to talk, right?”

Mr. Kerry does in many ways appear changed from the presidential candidate of 2004, when he exasperated his party as stiff, slow to respond to President George W. Bush’s attacks and trapped in his own labyrinth of words. For a few hours on Election Day, exit polls indicated that Mr. Kerry would be the victor, but he needed 59,000 voters to go his way in Ohio (he lost by more than three million votes nationwide) and returned to the Senate tagged with the reputation of a liberal, highly partisan loner. He was largely missing from major action on Capitol Hill for the next few years.

Mr. Kerry, 67, disputes that narrative by saying that he was busy as the chairman of the Senate Small Business Committee, but that few paid attention. “I wasn’t going to sit around and mope,” he said. Still, he acknowledges how difficult it was to come back.

“I was 59,000 votes and one state from being able to put an agenda in front of the country,” he said. “And you know for three or four hours we thought it was done.” So, he said, “you go from that expectation of beginning to think about what you’re going to say to the country to suddenly coming back to the Senate and having to sort of walk a careful line, and not being the nominee, and no pretense about leadership.”

There is no argument that things changed when Mr. Kerry became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee after Senator Joseph R. Biden left the position to be vice president in early 2009. Mr. Kerry was further thrust into prominence when he became his state’s senior senator upon the death of Mr. Kennedy the same year. By then Mr. Kerry, who had a lackluster history as a legislator and was known more for conducting Senate inquiries, had gone to work negotiating with Republicans on the new Start arms control treaty, which was successful, and a major climate change bill, which was not.

Although President Obama had passed over Mr. Kerry for secretary of state in favor of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Kerry became a roving diplomat and trouble-shooter for the Obama administration in Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, among other countries. When he was not overseas, his colleagues noticed him around more in the Senate.

During the three months of debt reduction talks, Mr. Kerry reached out a number of times to the Republicans on the panel. He went on long weekend bike rides with Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, and had Mr. Portman, other Republicans and Democrats over to his house in Georgetown for a dinner of roast chicken, mashed potatoes and peas. Although Mr. Kerry argued intensely with a pivotal Republican on the panel, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, he insisted their relationship was basically good.

“Kyl and I sparred,” Mr. Kerry said, “but Kyl and I have gotten to know each other pretty well, through the Start agreement and now this, and I have respect for his intellectual ability, and he’s dogged. He believes what he believes. You can’t personalize it. Everybody came with a point of view.”

After Thanksgiving — Mr. Kerry said he would make his mother’s chestnut and sausage stuffing for himself and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry — the senator still intends to pursue deficit reduction, he said, and to try to hammer out a deal in Congress, however unlikely. He also plans to resume work on the Foreign Relations Committee, which he largely set aside since signing up for the debt panel in the summer. Next month he is to meet in Cairo with Egypt’s military rulers, students and aspiring politicians.

“What they’re wrestling with right now is how much power to put in the hands of a new prime minister, to try to meet the needs of the people on the ground,” Mr. Kerry said of Egypt’s turmoil. “It’s almost the second phase of a revolution.”

In the meantime, he fends off suggestions that he is auditioning to be secretary of state once Mrs. Clinton steps down, as she has said she will at the end of Mr. Obama’s term. “I’m very happy with what I’m doing,” Mr. Kerry said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect middle initial for the vice president. He is Joseph R. Biden, not Joseph I.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.